Did unsubstantiated injury rumors scare Orioles away?

The latest unsubstantiated rumor out of Baltimore is that the Orioles were scared off Adam Jones because of a supposed degenerative hip condition.

There is no confirmation to the story, and there may not be any substance to it. The story got its start when a Baltimore radio station brought it up midday Tuesday.

Seattle general manager Bill Bavasi, who has been working on a trade that would send Jones and several others to the Orioles in exchange for starting pitcher Erik Bedard, wouldn’t confirm a hip problem. Neither, for that matter, would he deny it.

But when team trainer Rick Griffin talked about the injuries facing the club gearing up toward spring training last Thursday, Jones’s hip wasn’t part of the equation.

Griffin, reached Tuesday afternoon, said that he wasn’t allowed to say anything now either way.

Baseball in general and the Mariners in specific adhere to the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy rules, which forbid health care providers from releasing a patient’s health history except under very closely spelled out guidelines.

Under some circumstances Bavasi would be able to address the issue, but he didn’t do so when the question came up Tuesday afternoon.

”All I can tell you is that we brought Adam Jones home from Venezuela,” Bavasi said. ”Beyond that, we’re not saying anything.”

Jones has been a regular in the lineup for Lara in Venezuela for the last month or so and had helped the Cardinales make it into the winter league post-season. There were no reports of any kind of hip injury, much less a degenerative one.

Meanwhile, Bedard told the Ottawa Citizen mid-afternoon that he hadn’t heard anything from either the Orioles or the Mariners about any trade going down.